On Thursday, three businessmen and a government contracting official entered guilty pleas to involvement in a $550 million bribery scam involving the troubled US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Maryland resident Roderick Watson is accused of accepting bribes totalling more than $1 million during his tenure at USAID in exchange for exploiting his authority as a trusted guardian of public funds to steer 14 important federal contracts to two consulting firms, Apprio and Vistant.
Watson, 57, faces up to 15 years in prison after entering a guilty plea to bribing a public official. In October, he is expected to be sentenced.
The Justice Department claims that as part of the complex plan, Walter Barnes, the owner of Vistant, and Darryl Britt, the owner of Apprio, concealed some of the payments intended for Watson by using Paul Young, the president of a subcontractor that both Vistant and Apprio use, as an intermediary.
Each of the three businessmen entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to bribe a public officer. Barnes also entered a guilty plea to securities fraud.
According to the DOJ, the scam began in 2013 when Watson, then a contracting officer for USAID, consented to use his position at the government organisation to direct contracts to Britt’s Apprio company in return for payments.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) had classified Britt’s company as “socially and economically disadvantaged,” making it eligible for lucrative federal contracts.
The plan changed after Apprio “graduated” from the SBA 8(a) programme, and between 2018 and 2022, Watson started giving Barnes’ Vistant company, an Apprio subcontractor, premier contracts in return for bribery.
As part of the plot, the three businessmen gave the USAID official “cash, laptops, thousands of dollars in tickets to a suite at an NBA game, a country club wedding, downpayments on two residential mortgages, cellular phones, and jobs for relatives.”
The DOJ claims that the wrongdoing was concealed through the employment of shell corporations, fictitious invoices, and phoney payroll sheets.
Young, 62, Britt, 64, and Barnes, 46, could all spend up to five years in prison.
The chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Matthew Galeotti, said in a statement that the defendants used fraud and bribes to try to enrich themselves at the expense of American taxpayers. By tainting the federal government’s procurement procedure, their plan betrayed the public’s confidence.
“Anybody who cares about good and effective government should be concerned about the waste, fraud, and abuse in government agencies, including USAID,” he continued. “Those who engage in bribery schemes to exploit the US Small Business Administration’s vital economic programs for small businesses — whether individuals or corporations acting through them — will be held to account.”
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When Elon Musk, a billionaire businessman, commanded the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he named USAID one of his first targets for drastic reduction.
In statements from the Oval Office in February, President Trump said that USAID’s expenditures were primarily “corrupt or ridiculous,” adding that “the whole thing is a fraud.”
Musk has claimed that a “viper’s nest of radical left Marxists who hate America” are running the agency like a “criminal organisation.”
As part of its efforts to dismantle USAID, DOGE terminated almost all USAID personnel and contractors and cut more than $8 billion in financing.
